If San Andreas—the faux-California setting for the latest Grand Theft Auto—had a state motto.

If San Andreas—the faux-California setting for the latest Grand Theft Auto—had a state motto, it would be “Vincio tuus foris, stultus.”* still here’s a close second: “Land of opportunity.” And that’s not just because you take star thug Carl “CJ” Johnson from the ghetto to the convenient life. The state also packs a nearly limitless number of diversions, from high-stakes gambling to small-business ownership. single tour through the territory just isn’t enough to descry everything, so we asked Rockstar Games CEO Terry Donovan, President Sam Houser, and Creative Director Dan Houser what you might have missed.

EGM: for a like reason how did a bunch of frights from Scotland research all of San Andreas’ inner-city content?

Terry Donovan: Research is a really important part of unravelling It is vital to obtain the style and feel of the time and the place right. The team from Rockstar North went forward a long research trip to the West Coast and traveled around photographing everything and absorbing everything. We also have a really meticulous team of researchers based in just discovered York who obsess over each detail, and this combined with working closely with commonalty like [tattoo artist] Mister Cartoon, [rap photographer] Estevan Oriol, and [screenwriter] DJ pah to draw on their knowledge and experience of the West Coast at that time helped to really levy as much detail and feeling for the era into the game.

EGM: for a like reason if we looked in your unravelling offices, would we see a doom of empty 40s and half-smoked joints?

TD: Maybe, moreover that’s not research!

EGM: What’s the single thing you’re most proud of in a game this huge?

Dan Houser: I think the essence that we worked the hardest forward was the stuff that you don’t necessarily notice. It’s not just the size of the world. It’s not just that it takes thus long to get from common side to the other. It’s also that you can walk up to a soda machine and finish a drink out of it, no matter where you descry one. We worked really hard forward things like the pedestrians speaking to united another. In the previous games, you could stream around and there would be all these family around, but there wasn’t to a great degree going on. This time you can just sit back and watch all the freaks interact with each other. Occasionally, you’ll behold that they just don’t like each other and they’ll steady start to fight. We’re still scratching the surface of each pedestrian having a life in a virtual world, rather than just having them cruise around a gameplay environment.

EGM: a of those cross-country missions achieve pretty long. Were you worried that for a like reason much trekking from point A to B would use gamers off?

TD: Not really. The cross-country trips are there by way of design, and I think Rockstar North did an incredible do job-work balancing the game. The trips are there to help players learn their way around the exceedingly large state of San Andreas. Any time they didn’t want a player to have to repeat a prolonged trip, they implemented a Trip Skip [a feature that obstructions you skip long road trips in later attempts at failed missions].

EGM: Anything you discovered by dint of accident you could do, a tester did, or that happened in the world that you didn’t plan for?

TD: Let’ just say the versatility of the parachute at no time ceases to amaze us.

EGM: for what purpose the jump to three cities instead of a larger version of the kind of thing you’d done before?

Sam Houser: We be enamoured of L.A., and the whole gangbanging vibe, and the public way culture. That time [early ’90s] in L.A. is in such a manner important and we knew a drawn out time ago that the franchise povertyed to end up there. We’d done the East Coast in GTA3, and then ’80 Miami with Vice City, in the way that going to L.A. in the early ’90 just have the appearanceed like an obvious place for us to walk We’ve explored lots of possibilities for the franchise, and we’ve awaited at going back in time and playing with the ’30 ’40 and ’50 yet it just doesn’t feel like GTA, y’know? That’s not to say that we won’t explore something like that in coming time but for now this is it.

EGM: in like manner why the other two cities?

SH: We were drawn to doing a city based in succession San Francisco because of the hills and all the beautiful landscape with the bridges and the Victorian architecture. formerly we’d decided to do that, it became clear that if you’re doing L.A. and San Francisco, you can’t not do Vegas. Again there’s a highly different look and feel, and you have the whole Mafia vibe, and the gambling and the bright lights. formerly we put together the three cities, things started to naturally unfold We realized that we penuryed the wilderness with the farms and merit [i]or[/i] demerit etc.

EGM: Was there anything the team wanted to do with the game moreover couldn’t?

DH: Not really. If I had my way, we’d have 1000 missions and 100 different story lines, further the team is already big, and if I’m free from shams I don’t really want to have to make it any bigger. We’ve achieved a sort of natural scale for a unravelling team on a game like this because we had the voluptuousness of sorting out a hazard of our problems [in the prequels] That’s to what end we were able to do as abundant as we did for San Andreas in just sum of two units years.